There are cries from a few corners of the fandom that call for there to be more realism in the art, to make things look like a more legitimate form of fighting. I have to wonder whether those people have ever seen a real fight, i.e. a MMA match. Either they’re already MMA fans and miss the entire point about wrestling, they’re somehow brainwashed into thinking that mainstream acceptance (i.e. not being fake) will make it cool to be a wrestling fan in the eyes of others or they have some other perverse reason why they want wrestling to still be real to them, dammit1.
That’s why I always find it funny when cries from those same fans come up reveling in calling out wrestlers for obvious botches, like they expect every move to look perfect and clean and crisp. That’s an awfully funny set of paradoxical standards. On one hand, everything’s supposed to look realistic, but on the other, if there’s any hint of a guy flubbing a move, it’s the end of the world. I mean, have these people ever watched someone fight for real? It’s the opposite of crisp and clean.
Granted, botches can look bad and be bad at times. I mean, it was a botched running powerbomb that sent Droz to an early retirement via wheelchair. Botched piledrivers led to Ricky Steamboat and Steve Austin ending their active careers. Those kinds of things are filed under “S” for “Shit Happens”, but they’re still the kinds of things that pro wrestling can do without. What happens when it’s something benign, like maybe slipping on a rope, or mistiming a move? Well, there’s no definitive answer to that hypothetical question. It all depends on how the botch is handled.
I’ll give you two examples of some pretty high-profile botches in WWE in calendar year 2011. The first is an example of the two wrestlers handling it right. The Miz was wrestling Daniel Bryan on RAW, back when both guys still had their respective Championships. Miz had Bryan in the electric chair position2, and clearly, the intent was that the Awesome One would pull off some kind of offensive maneuver. However, there was a miscommunication (some online accused Miz of sandbagging Bryan, which I thought ludicrous, but whatever), and the move fell apart. Rather than making it look bad, they improvised, with Bryan segueing from being the victim to making it look like a clever counter into a rear naked choke. It turned a bad moment into something that really enhanced the match. Later on, Miz was able to hit the electric chair spot, and all was well with the world.
Contrast that with Sin Cara’s first WWE match against Primo. The finish was scheduled to be a Spanish Fly, or a top-rope backflip Rock Bottom, but before he could hit the move, Cara fell to the floor. We learned it was a botch, not because of the action of Cara falling from the top, but because of how they handled it afterwards. There was an awkward stoppage in action, with Cara and Primo looking at each other like something was wrong. Primo just sat there and waited for Cara to get back to the top to finish him off rather than improvising something to make it look like more of a planned spot. It totally killed the match, and it had people rightfully crying about a botch that really detracted from what turned out to be an otherwise decent tilt.
So, it’s not so much the act of botching itself, but it’s the handling of it that will make or break a wrestling match or even a promo. So why don’t some people look at the whole picture when analyzing this sort of thing? Do we blame our inner nature to point and laugh? Can we blame the mutants at the ECW Arena for starting the trend by chanting “YOU FUCKED UP! YOU FUCKED UP!” at obvious botches? Actually, I’m far less interested in assigning blame than I am at fixing the problem of our waiting-for-a-car-crash-at-NASCAR attitude towards it.
Believe me, handling a botch correctly adds far more of this mythical “realism” to the product than anything else. Besides, I’m not entirely sure that I want to watch a product where they don’t Irish whip people any more, or where body slams become more of a deadlift competition than a wrestling move. However, I will thoroughly enjoy it when guys like Bryan, Miz and others think on their feet and turn lemons into lemonade. That kind of “realism” is welcome in my wrestling any day.
1 - Point of reference, because this vid is never not funny.
2 - For those who aren’t familiar, the electric chair position is when one guy is sitting on the other guy’s shoulders, like if they’re getting ready to play “chicken”. This set-up is most commonly used for the Road Warriors’ Doomsday Device.
TH writes The Wrestling Blog and broadcasts The Wrestling Podcast. You can find him on Twitter, or at various other spots around the Internet. He also loves Chikara, and quite frankly, thinks you should too.
Edited by Jason Mann
